Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad is a Research Scientist at University of Washington’s Harborview Medical Center and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Washington Bothell. He has had academic appointments at University of Washington, Center for Cognitive Science at University of Minnesota, Minnesota Population Center, and the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He also spent a year studying Christian Theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was part of the Sinai & Synapses Fellowship (2019-2020) incubated by The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Muhammad also has worked in applied AI in industry for several startups and large corporations. He has also served as an advisor to various startups and governmental bodies on practical aspects of AI implementation. His current focus areas of research are algorithmic nudging at scale, simulation modeling, artificial intelligence, and personality emulation. His research on grief tech, especially the use of AI to simulate the deceased, has been widely acclaimed and covered in multiple documentaries. He is currently working on technical and ethical issues around the use of AI surrogates in end-of-life decision making. Email: [email protected]
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad This Monday, just like every day, Alice logs into her laptop. She starts chatting with her fovorite chatbot and feels that something is off. She has been talking to the chatbot almost every day for the last two years. This morning, however, the conversation seems different. It feels stiff, as if…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad I recall reading a short piece of fiction as a high school student at the turn of the millenium called Catching Crumbs from the Table. It was written by Ted Chiang and later republished under the title The Evolution of Human Science. Chiang imagined a future in which genetically enhanced metahumans…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the first part of this series I described the data footprint that now surrounds a child before birth. It could take the form of an implantation score attached to an embryo, a polygenic risk estimate read from a few of its cells, a sequenced genome, growth curves etc. These may…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In an earlier piece about teaching machines to predict death, I opened with the old idea that a person often meets their destiny on the road they take to avoid it. Stories around this themes are often read as parables of trying to evade prophecy where the effort to escape a…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Imagine this, you would pass a room, hear a small voice conducting a negotiation between a plastic horse and a folded piece of cardboard meant to serve as a castle, and understand that something serious was happening. The talking horse was ridden by teddy bears and the castle walls were made…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the 1840s, nearly all of the potatoes grown in Ireland came from a single cultivar called the Irish Lumper. It was a good potato. It was reliable, high-yielding, well-suited to the wet Irish soil, capable of feeding a family through a winter on a small plot of ground. In enabled…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad The French poet Jean de La Fontaine has a famous quote that “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” We find echoes of this phenomenon in global literature, whether it’s Oedipus in the Greek Myths, Rostum and Sohrab from Iran, or the story of…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad While mainstream AI debates are focused on the usual argument about benchmark scores, hallucinations, alignment etc., there is a different sort of debate regarding AI going on in the obscure corners of Reddit. The debate is about what kind of thing an AI might be becoming or it may already be.…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad There is a particular moment of weakness that most of us recognize without needing to name it. You are lying in your bed, it is late at night. The light from the phone is brighter than the background in the room. The day has thinned your patience as well as your…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad This is the last part of our discussion on the culture of limits (Part I, Part II, and Part III). In Hindu thought limits that define finitude and infinity were never opposed in a simple or antagonistic way. Instead, they were understood as mutually implicated. One could even say that they…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the last two parts we have discussed encountering the boundary of reason as fracture, and dissolving the boundary altogether. Now we talk about the Islamicate intellectual tradition and how it addresses this threshold. It cultivated a disciplined attentiveness to what appears when knowing falters i.e., a state not of confusion,…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the previous article of this series I started with the exploration of the concept that every civilization eventually arrives at the edge of its own knowing. It was not meant to be exhaustive or a critique but rather exploration of certain themes in Western thinking. Based on the feedback I…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Every civilization eventually reaches the edge of its own understanding. The Enlightenment, which was basically a grand project of faith in reason, sought to replace the mysteries of revelation with the lucidity of thought. It promised that disciplined rationality could illuminate every corner of existence. It was thought that that through…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Artificial intelligence is generally conceptualized as a new technology which goes back only decades. In the popular imagination, at best we stretch it back to the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 or perhaps the birth of the Artificial Neurons a decade prior. Yet the impulse to imagine, build, and even worry over…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In recent years chatbots powered by large language models have been slowing moving to the pulpit. Tools like QuranGPT, Gita GPT, Buddhabot, MagisteriumAI, and AI Jesus have sparked contentious debates about whether machines should mediate spiritual counsel or religious interpretation: Can a chatbot offer genuine pastoral care? What happens when we…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad When the internet first entered homes in the 1990s, parents worried about their children stumbling onto inappropriate websites, being targeted in online chatrooms, or spending endless hours glued to screens. Schools held workshops about “stranger danger” online, and families installed early filters to keep kids safe. Those concerns were real, but…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad The first part of the series highlighted the historical moment that we are currently living in, how bots are invading the most intimate parts of human relationships. If it was digital transformation of society that enabled loneliness as a mass-phenomenon, then AI is now in a position to monetize loneliness. AI…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the early 2000s, a curious phenomenon emerged in Japan: some grown men began forming intimate relationships with inanimate pillows bearing images of anime girls, a phenomenon known as “2-D love.” When I first encountered this phenomenon, I wondered if people could grow emotionally attached to two-dimensional printed images, how much…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad You are scrolling through photos from your childhood and come across one where you are playing on a beach with your grandfather. You do not remember ever visiting a beach but chalk it up to the unreliability of childhood memories. Over the next few months, you revisit the image several times.…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Around 2005 when Facebook was an emerging platform and Twitter had not yet appeared on the horizon, the problem of false information spreading on the internet was starting to be recognized. I was an undergrad researching how gossip and fads spread in social networks. I imagined a thought experiment where there…